"Morbidly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... domiciled in his palace, with all his sycophancy of rank, with all his courtly flattering. In like manner, when the grand seigneurs and noble dames of that aristocratic age wept over the sorrows of the "New Heloise," or craved that imaginary state of untutored innocence which Rousseau so morbidly described, or admired those brilliant generalizations of laws which Montesquieu had penned, or laughed at the envenomed ironies of Voltaire, or quoted the atheistic doctrines of D'Alembert and Diderot, or enthusiastically discussed the economical ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... that the wedding were over, morbidly dreading the heat and crush and excitement which she knew awaited her and to which she felt ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... far from strong," replied Mr. Denham, "and my wife is almost morbidly quick to take alarm about her. In fact, we both are. Do you know how the trains run to Geneva? Is there anything earlier than the ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... girl or woman is tiresome and unpleasant as a companion, but the morbidly discontented woman is far worse. Perhaps you have met her, with her eternal complaint of the injustice of Fate ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... things," said Seaton, thoughtfully. "Such a one as that beast Luigi has planted in Enoch's mind can warp his entire life. He evidently is of a morbidly sensitive temperament, proud to a fault, high strung and introspective. Until some one can prove to him that his mother was not a harlot, he'll never be entirely normal. And it's been my observation that one of the most fundamentally weakening ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... nervously. "Maybe I'm lazy, I don't know; but I've worked so long that I'm weary to death of commonplace and repression and denial and—dinginess. I want to be a free individual and have leisure and opportunity to feel things, not to do them. I'm selfish, hopelessly selfish, morbidly selfish; but I am as I am. I'm like the plant that's raised in a cellar and can't leave because its roots are sunk there deep. I want to be transplanted perforce out into the sunshine. I'm hungry for it, hungry. I've caught glimpses ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... some days before his final parting with Johnson he had witnessed the execution of fifteen men before Newgate and been clouded in his mind by doubts as to whether human life was or was not mere machinery and a chain of planned fatality. These cravings are clearly the marks of a mind morbidly affected and diseased, the result of the Dutch marriage as Ramsay believed. All through his life Boswell is conscious of his 'distempered imagination,' and the letters to Temple are scattered with irrelevances and repetitions, fatuities and inconsistencies that can ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... Henley-Whibley reaction wrote that if we were to be conquerors we must be less tender and more ruthless. Shaw answered with really avenging irony, "What a light this principle throws on the defeat of the tender Dervish, the compassionate Zulu, and the morbidly humane Boxer at the hands of the hardy savages of England, France, and Germany." In that sentence an idiot is obliterated and the whole story of Europe told; but it is immensely stiffened by its ironic form. In the same way Shaw washed away for ever the idea that Socialists were ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... suddenly and morbidly analytical, he watched for Cornelia's letters with increasingly passionate hopefulness, and met each fresh disappointment with increasingly passionate resentment. Except for the Serial-Letter Co.'s ingeniously varied ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... submission to her husband's will. Her intellectual life, such as it was, had stopped short from the time of her intimate association with Menteith; and her spiritual nature had been starved in close contact with him; only her senses had been nourished, and these were now being rendered morbidly active by disease. The shadow of an awful form of insanity already darkened her days. The mental torture was extreme; but she fought for her reason with the fearful malady valiantly; and all the time presented outwardly only the same ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... 'provided your conscience be not too morbidly tender, and your ideas of God not too erroneously severe; but can you suppose it would offend that benevolent Being to make the happiness of one who would die for yours?—to raise a devoted heart from purgatorial torments to a state of heavenly bliss, when you could do it without the slightest injury ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... she said, "you are a kind brother in all but the constructions you put upon my doings. I think it would be better if there were more difference between our ages. You are a young guardian, over anxious, and often morbidly fanciful about me during your illness. I think we shall be happier together when you no longer feel ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... harmful result on the minds of his contemporaries, they watched in him, with only contemptuous admiration, the fantasy of zoological instinct which filled his house with painted dogs, cats, and birds, because he was too poor to fill it with real ones. Their judgment of this morbidly naturalistic art was conclusively expressed by the sentence of Donatello, when going one morning into the Old Market, to buy fruit, and finding the animal painter uncovering a picture, which had cost ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... of us are going to act through the schools we have. We are going to make room in our present over-managed, morbidly organised institutions, with ordered-around teachers, for teachers who cannot be ordered around, who are accustomed to use their imaginations and personalities to teach with, instead of superintendents. We are going to have superintendents who will desire such teachers. ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... quiet on the Potomac"; and the fact that General McClellan was in full sympathy with the Border State policy of the President aggravated their unfriendly mood. A majority of the members of the committee became morbidly sensitive, and were practically incapable of doing General McClellan justice. They were thoroughly discouraged and disgusted; but when Secretary Cameron left the Cabinet and Stanton took his place, their despondency gave place to hope. He had faith in the usefulness of the committee, and ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... I fear you are morbidly sensitive I used to know your father, and I always esteemed him as a noble ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... abandoned himself for a few moments to the feeling of relief he always experienced when his week's work was done. To say that no secular thoughts had intruded themselves upon the rector's mind, as he planned and wrote that sermon, would not be true; for, though morbidly conscientious on many points and earnestly striving to be a faithful shepherd of the souls committed to his care, Arthur Leighton possessed the natural desire that those who listened to him should not only think well of what he taught but also of the form in which the teaching was ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... a conscious effort that I shook myself out of this morbidly reflective mood, on finding that we had crossed the common and were come to ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... of the firearm he fell into an agony of fear and apprehension. He knew that one of the sailors might be the author of it; but the fact that he had left the revolver with Jane, together with the overwrought condition of his nerves, made him morbidly positive that she was threatened with some great danger. Perhaps even now she was attempting to defend herself against ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of books,) wrote for him the story of her life, and drew on the resources of her marvellous memory for his amusement. The old woman's kindness was one of the few bright things in poor Conway's unhappy life. His temperament was morbidly sensitive; and when, in 1821, while acting in London, Theodore Hook attacked him in the most cruel and offensive manner in the columns of the "John Bull," he threw up his engagement, determined to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... not find Mark more difficult to deal with than most budding authors, and in this case Mark was morbidly anxious to get the money part of the transaction over as soon as possible; he could not decide whether his conscience would be better or worse satisfied if he insisted on the best pecuniary terms he could ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... to a sentimental old bachelor," he said, with his winning smile. "But these ghosts were bad for me. I was in danger of becoming absurdly self-centered, almost morbidly introspective. Mac, whose heart is the biggest I know, and who laughs away more troubles than I ever dreamed of, rallied me about it, and showed me that I ought to turn my disappointment to some use. This was about ten ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... disappearance of one eye; under a large red swelling, combined with a patulous and rubescent nose, detracted to some extent from the dignity of his appearance. An ugly patch of crimson over his left ribs held the attention fantastically, morbidly. It was blood, human blood, his own blood. The thought ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... Eric felt that he knew Barbara's moods in advance. Lady Knightrider—a curse on her name—had started by setting every nerve on edge; the sight of Agnes Waring—with Jack's eyes, hair and voice—had completed her discomfiture; and Barbara had been morbidly drawing one unhappy picture after another. Jack was incapacitated; and, with his pride, he would never win through pity what he had failed to win on merit. Incapacitated or not, Jack was a pauper; and, with his fantastic honour, he would regard himself as an ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... novels of doubtful or bad morality is as likely to corrupt the Affections as to associate with low and wicked companions. There is an abundant supply of pure and noble compositions of this sort on which the Imagination may feed without fear. If it morbidly craves the licentious pictures that come from the pen of such writers as Ainsworth or George Sand, its longings should be resisted as steadfastly as those which incline us to the gaming table or other ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... principles than to persons, lavishing upon ideas or the fanciful creations of art a passionate affection which he grudgingly withheld from human beings, stubbornly tenacious of a set of political dogmas to which he was ready to sacrifice his dearest friends, morbidly sensitive to the faintest suggestion of a personal slight, and prompter than the serpent to vent against the aggressor the bitterness of his poison, he plays the role of Ishmael among the men of letters in his day. The violence ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... I never liked Mr. L'Hommedieu, but I did like her. She was so different from me, and, when I first knew her, so gay and so full of conversation. But after a while she changed and was either feverishly cheerful or morbidly sad, so that my visits caused me more pain than pleasure. The reason for these changes in her was patent to everybody. Though her husband was a handsome man, he was as unprincipled as he was unfortunate. He gambled. This ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... a person thoroughly to know him or her self, unless he or she be morbidly addicted to incessant self-examination! Audrey thought that it was mere neighbourliness that induced her to call on the Blakes that afternoon; she had no idea that a strong curiosity made her wish to interview ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... down late, and was very silent and irresponsive. He too was morbidly conscious of the pictures, though he wished his father wouldn't talk about them. He was conscious of everything that meant money—of his mother's pearls for instance, which she wore every evening without thinking about them. If he did well with ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sinister Undertaker's Apprentice, ready to do his hangman's duty. There, as they crossed the mielles, while the sea droned its sing-song on his left, was the parson droning his sing-song on the right "In the midst of life we are in death," etc. There were the grumbling drums, and the crowd morbidly enjoying their Roman holiday; and there, looming up before him, were the four stone pillars on the Mont es Pendus from which he was to swing. His disgust deepened. He was not dying like a seafarer who had fairly earned ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... early hour, and to the dismay of Plume, who had planned to start without farewell demonstration of any kind, lights were blinking in almost every house along the row, and a flock of women, some tender and sympathetic, some morbidly curious, had gathered to wish the major's wife a pleasant journey and a speedy recovery. They loved her not at all, and liked her none too well, but she was ill and sorrowing, so that was enough. Elise they could not bear, ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... something really pathetic about the Eugenist's neglect of the aristocrat and his family affairs. People still talk about the pride of pedigree; but it strikes me as the one point on which the aristocrats are almost morbidly modest. We should be learned Eugenists if we were allowed to know half as much of their heredity as we are of their hairdressing. We see the modern aristocrat in the most human poses in the illustrated papers, playing with his dog or parrot—nay, we see him playing with his child, or with his ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... recommended a course of metaphysical study to a young lady, who, from physical weakness and other causes, had become morbidly nervous ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... views of her father, and the temptations to which she herself was hourly exposed, kept his jealousies and fears perpetually on the watch. He is supposed, indeed, to have been indebted to self-observation for that portrait of a wayward and morbidly sensitive lover, which he has drawn so strikingly in ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... buttons of the glove. It was a generously formed arm, but so long that it looked slender, and its firm white roundness was flawless from wrist to shoulder. He shut his eyes, but he could see it through his eyelids. Sitting beside her like this, in the semidarkness, morbidly aware of the perfume of her hair and dress, he suddenly forgot that he had been rude, and she indifferent. He was conscious only of the wish to drive it home to her, how unhappy ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... the life she led, morbidly eager for change, she was a secessionist from the first, and had welcomed the war. Moreover, strange as it may seem, she loved this worthless Lysander. She hated him for the misery he had caused her; she was exceedingly bitter against him; yet love lurked under all. She ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... entire activity of art, which fashions peculiar forms for peculiar ideas, must have flagged in its exertions when the natural circle of ideas among the Greeks had received complete plastic embodiment, or it must have been morbidly driven to abnormal inventions. We find, therefore, that art, during this period, with greater or less degrees of skill in execution, delighted now in fantastical, now in effeminate productions, calculated merely to charm the senses. And even in the better and nobler works of the time there ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... strangers, who had evidently been attracted by mere curiosity. There were a lot of people there who certainly did not belong to this neighbourhood. And when the proceedings were over, they came crowding round that table, morbidly inquisitive about the dead man's belongings. What easier, as I said to the inspector, than for some one of them—perhaps a curio-hunter—to quietly pick up that box and make off with it? There are people who'd give a good deal to lay hold of a ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... not shrink from labor, but with the false pride so general she did shrink morbidly from meeting those who knew her in the past, and from their learning where and how she lived. She was wholly bent on seclusion until their fortunes were greatly mended, fondly hoping that her father would rally such a constituency from ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... editor, he was apt to burn them and complain that he was neglected. Studying the man as he reveals himself at this time in his Note-Books (published in a garbled edition by the Hawthorne family), one has the impression that he was a shy, sensitive genius, almost morbidly afraid of the world. From a distance he sent out his stories as "feelers", when these were ignored he shrank into ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... moonshine, cast by some morbidly radiating Coleridge into the chaos of a fermenting life, act magically there, and produce divulsions and convulsions and diseased developments. So dark and abstruse, without lamp or authentic finger-post, ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... like a last farewell. Then, there being none to witness his weakness, he laid his head down upon the battered old desk, and wept as he had not wept since his childhood. He had a proud spirit, and circumstances had made him morbidly sensitive. He was very young to indulge in a man's hopes and aspirations; but age is not always determined by years. Already he had dreamed his dreams, had his visions of a glorious future, in which he should build up a home for ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... of charity. He picks from Mr. Froude's four volumes a number of tid-bits, setting forth Carlyle's querulousness, arrogance, and domestic storms with Mrs. Carlyle. Behold the man! exclaims Mr. Watkinson. Begging his pardon, it is not the man at all. Carlyle was morbidly sensitive by nature, he suffered horribly from dyspepsia, and intense literary labor, still further deranging his nerves, made him terribly irritable. But he had a fine side to his nature, and even a sunny side. Friends like Professor Tyndall, Professor Norton, Sir James Stephen, ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... St. Anthony. Zulu catechumens. Haunted Covenanters. Strange case of Thomas Smeaton. Law's 'Memorialls'. A deceitful spirit. Examples of insane and morbidly sensitive ghosts. 'Le revenant qui s'accuse s'excuse.' Raising the devil in Irvine. Mode of evocation. Wodrow. His account of Margaret Lang, and Miss Shaw of Bargarran. The unlucky Shaws. Lord Torphichen's son. Cases from Wodrow. Lord Middleton's story. Haunted house. Wraiths. ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... in reply to several of mine, which, I gathered from what you said, reached you all at the same time, was my salvation, mentally and physically. Its healthy, manly common- sense tone acted upon my morbidly affected mind like a strong tonic mingled with wine; it swept away the mists which had beclouded my intellect, as the keen fresh mountain breeze sweeps the morning fog from out the valleys; it set me thinking, and asking myself questions which had never occurred to me before; ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... garb of a serene, confiding, and harmonious soul, and whose polished grace, at once modest and naive, sportive and sweet, fulfilled the charm of innate goodness of heart. Susceptible in temperament, anticipating with ardent fancy the lot of a lovely and refined woman, and morbidly exaggerating her own slight personal defects, Margaret seemed to long, as it were, to transfuse with her force this nymph-like form, and to fill her to glowing with her own lyric fire. No drop of envy tainted the sisterly love, ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... peculiar intimacy and strictness. But what shall we say, when an individual discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone, on the same vast sheet of record! In such a case, it could only be the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul's history ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... herself passing through the main ward of the hut, rows of beds on either hand. She seemed to be morbidly conscious of scores of eyes upon her, and was glad when she found herself in the passage ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... three thousand seven hundred and forty-nine pounds, were sold for seventeen thousand and ninety-four pounds. As Turner grew older and his manner deteriorated he was assailed by the wits, the art critics, and the amateurs with cruel badinage, and to these censures Turner was morbidly sensitive. But even Ruskin admits that the pictures of his last five years are of "wholly inferior value," with unsatisfactory foliage, chalky faces, and general ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... hastily raised eyes dark with trouble, looking at her lover for the first time. And so looking, she took her hands from his grasp with a hastiness which might have been a little rasping to a morbidly ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... perpetually into the very fibres of their being, causing them intolerable anguish of heart. Tender exceedingly to the pain of others, they wept for their own powerlessness to help; and their own susceptibilities were almost morbidly acute. Neither age nor the continual spectacle of the drama of Paris life had hardened two souls still young and childlike and pure; the longer they lived, indeed, the more keenly they felt their inward suffering; for so it is, alas! with natures ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... agricultural England in the last days of the old regime,—the days of full-orbed Toryism, of Trafalgar and of Waterloo, when the invasive spirit of French domination threw England back upon a sense of her own insular solidity, and made her for the time doubly, brutally, morbidly English. Perhaps the best pages in the work are the first thirty, telling the story of poor Marner's disappointments in friendship and in love, his unmerited disgrace, and his long, lonely twilight-life at Raveloe, with the sole companionship of his loom, in which his muscles ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... enthusiasm for this branch of study. Wishing to find out something about his undergraduate career, I wrote to a member of the Faculty, and received the following reply: "Many persons found him almost morbidly indifferent and unresponsive, and he seldom showed the full measure of his powers.... I grew to have a strong liking for him personally as well as a respect for his intellectual power. But I should never have expected him to show the robustness of either mind or body which we now know him to ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... almost the first thing we think about is, what will people say; and nearly half the troubles and bothers of life may be traced to our anxiety on this score; it is the anxiety which is at the bottom of all that feeling of self-importance, which is so often mortified because it is so very morbidly sensitive. It is solicitude about what others will say that underlies all our vanity and pretension, yes, and all our show and swagger too. Without it, there would not be a tenth part of the luxury which exists. Pride in every form, point d'honneur and ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... one more narrow escape. If he had been detected—as he must have been in another instant—in smuggling pudding in an envelope he might have incautiously betrayed his real motives, and then, as the Doctor was morbidly sensitive concerning all complaints of the fare he provided, he would have got into worse trouble than the unfortunate Jolland, to say nothing of the humiliation of being detected ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... are not anxious enough to doubt. Men who love will have their misgivings at times; that is not the evil. But the evil is, when men go on in that languid, doubting way, content to doubt, proud of their doubts, morbidly glad to talk about them, liking the romantic gloom of twilight, without the manliness to say—I must and will know the truth. That did not John. Brethren, John appealed to Christ. He did exactly what we do when we pray—and he got his answer. Our ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... are more frequently men of action than thinkers. They are not gifted with keen foresight, nor could they be, as this quality generally conduces to doubt and inactivity. They are especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly nervous, excitable, half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness. However absurd may be the idea they uphold or the goal they pursue, their convictions are so strong that all reasoning is lost upon them. Contempt and persecution do not affect them, or only serve ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... hunter, a leash of chumber spaniels, and fifty pounds for a memorial ring. Mr. Wendover could not find fault with a will which left his wife seven hundred a year; but he felt that his position was diminished by his father-in-law's death, and he was morbidly jealous of the boy, who had absorbed so much of his wife's care and affection from the first hour of their coming ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... alternate quickness and inaction of an inexperienced intellect and an imagination morbidly awakened, to grasp the situation before him. The common sense that had hitherto governed his life told him that the deputy would go to-morrow, and that there was nothing in his wife's conduct to show that her coquetry and aberration would not pass as easily. But it ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... exceptional qualities were required. The conjugal complement to a Nausicaa must be a man of ponderous presence and statuesque demeanor—not a shrill and nervous modern like himself, with second-rate physique, and a morbidly active intellect. No, it mattered little what he did or left undone. The world would be no better and no worse for anything he could do. Very likely, in the arms of this chair where he was now sitting, a dozen Roman Romeos, in powdered wigs and silk stockings, had pined for ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... is even more familiar and dramatic. Again it is a group of morbidly curious and spiteful doctors who desire to see whether a human being can be killed by the power of his imagination. A condemned criminal is accordingly turned over to them. He is first allowed to see ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... win happiness and distinction. "Perhaps," says George Eliot, "some of the most terrible irony of the human lot is to hear a deep truth uttered by lips that have no right to it." Poor Gourlay was conscious of some feeling of this sort when he heard such truths proclaimed from such lips. To his morbidly-sensitive nature, such irony seemed an aggravation of all he had endured. To think that, after such experiences as had fallen to his share, a Family Compact judge should gravely inform him that in Upper Canada the administrators of the law should be no respecters of persons! ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... must have been a fitting Oriana to a young Amadis. It was not hard to see that Lady Ellinor was ambitious, that she had a love of fame for fame itself, that she was proud, that she set value (and that morbidly) on the world's opinion. This was perceptible when she spoke of her husband, even of her daughter. It seemed to me as if she valued the intellect of the one, the beauty of the other, by the gauge of the social ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... are quite conscious that they do not "get on" with others; and they are tempted to be morbidly irritable and exacting, or else to shut themselves up and say, "It's no use, no one wants me." If no one wants you, it is your fault; for if you were always ready to be unselfish and thoughtful for others in small ways, you would be wanted. You need not fret because you are not ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... her with a shade of anxiety; that tragic anxiety of the veteran artist scenting from afar the sneers of the new critics at his life-work, and morbidly conscious of ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Bartimeus chafed under the law's delay. They became morbidly sensitive to the incubus of Ginx's Baby, especially as the press had been reviewing some of their recent acts with great bitterness. The Guardians were defiant. Having served their notices, they were induced by Mr. Stink to resolve not to maintain the infant. ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... health and plenty to do in gorgeous weather, and so his case, which he had been examining rather morbidly, assumed a less painful aspect. His love and need of Joan remained just as strong, but the sense of martyrdom brought about by loneliness and self-analysis left him. Once more he assured himself that Joan was a kid and must have her head until she became a woman ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... distant Rock and a troubled sea with an intolerable heaviness in his breast, he recalled that so must his father have looked down on Poor Man's Rock in much the same anguished spirit long ago. And Jack MacRae's mind reacted morbidly to the suggestion, the parallel. His eyes turned with smoldering fire to the stumpy figure on ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... was one of the axioms he laid down across the Sevres and silver of an exquisitely appointed luncheon-table, when, on a later day, I had again run over from Monte Carlo; and Mrs. Gisburn, beaming on him, added for my enlightenment: "Jack is so morbidly sensitive to ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... were the special commissioner of the President, or perhaps as a special commissioner could not act at all. She was very aggressive, and when any of the travelling arrangements in Europe did not suit her ideas she was won't to shrilly exclaim: " Well ! New York is good enough for me." Nora, morbidly afraid that her ex- pense bill to the Daylight would not be large enough, had dragged her bodily off to Greece as her companion, friend and protection. At Arta they had heard of the grand success of the Greek army. The Turks had ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... imagination loves to rest upon its salient angles and projecting lines. When we commenced her sketch, our sole design was to describe her influence on the minds of others, and to make her a warning beacon to the mariners of life, that they might avoid the shoals on which the peace of so many morbidly sensitive minds have been wrecked. But we found a fascination in the subject which we could not resist. A heart naturally warm, defrauded of all natural objects on which to expend its living fervor, a mind naturally strong confined within close and narrow limits, an energy concentrated ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... provocation, point at him and call him 'Bellows's nigger,' or make faces and cry 'charity boy,' 'town's poor.' Now, fortunately, Joel had a happy, joyous nature—somewhat fiery and irascible, but still joyous—else he might have become morbidly miserable. As it was, these manifestations only provoked his anger, and led him forthwith into a rough-and-tumble fight, in which, whether victor or not, he always showed unquestionable pluck. If he came off ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... it to my good housekeeper, Mrs. Mozeen, not to forget the faithful services of past years. Need I add—if I had been free to act as I pleased—that I should have gladly made Rothsay the object of a handsome bequest? But this was not to be. My friend was a man morbidly sensitive on the subject of money. In the early days of our intercourse we had been for the first and only time on the verge of a quarrel, when I had asked (as a favor to myself) to be allowed to provide ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... asthenic disease. To prevent which, we must take a more nutritious diet, and join a portion of wine, and perhaps take some tonic medicines. This however ought to be done gradually, for fear of exhausting the excitability, which in these cases is morbidly accumulated. ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... treated with respect and consideration in her house. He saw his sister rarely and was not on intimate terms with her. In our circle he was always sullen, and never talkative; but from time to time, when his convictions were touched upon, he became morbidly irritable and very unrestrained in ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... impossible," said Sartoris, who had lapsed into his bland manner once more. "I am sensitive of people's remarks and all that kind of thing. I dare say you will think that I am morbidly self-conscious, but then I have not always been a cripple. I was as straight as yourself once. Fancy a little crooked figure like me ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... love silks and beautiful paintings and clean white linen and flowers; I love good food, good clothes, good wine, good music, good sermons, and good books. All—all it is within me to love and to desire mightily. How I want those things—not morbidly—but because I have five good senses and God knows how many more; because I was made to have ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... Macaulay tells us, hardly feels the scalping-knife as he shouts his death song. The soldier in the excitement of battle is often bereft of all sense of pain. On the other hand, the patient who is morbidly self-conscious becomes oblivious of his surroundings while he suffers intensely from sensations which are usually not appreciated at all. Self-conscious children will complain much of breathlessness and a sense of suffocation, of headache, of palpitation, of intolerable itching, ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... sheltered boy be further occasionally subjected to the inspection and criticism of some one from the outside world—a candid and outspoken elderly relative—he is likely to become, on the one hand, morbidly sensitive about those things which the other finds to blame, and, on the other, no less puffed up with pride in whatever is ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... introduced new influences of a more or less general character; such as a more vigorous or a more relaxed police; some temporary excitement from political or religious causes; or some incident generally notorious, of a nature to act morbidly on the imagination. That in spite of these unavoidable imperfections in the data, there should be so very trifling a margin of variation in the annual results, is a brilliant ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... that," he answered firmly. "I am not a morbidly curious person, nor do I want to pry into your affairs, but I cannot help feeling that you are in some sort of trouble, and that it would be good for you, in a strange country, to have some one on whose help you could ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... he had foolishly passed in London as an unmarried man, and that he could not take Phoebe back with him, because of the discomforts and risks in which a too early avowal of her would involve him. He was morbidly conscious of this; brooded over ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... walked in Rittenhouse Square and watched Trinity Church until its brown facade faded in the dusk. She expected Paul back at midnight, and sat up reading. She didn't love him, she told herself, but felt lonely and wished he would come. To be sure, she recalled with her morbidly keen memory that Howells had said: "There is no happy life for woman—the advantage that the world offers her is her choice in self-sacrifice." At two hours past the usual time, she went to bed and slept ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... is, in solitude, that this should happen to minds morbidly meditative,—that when we stretch out our arms in darkness, vainly striving to draw back the sweet faces that have vanished, slowly arises a new stratagem of grief, and we say, 'Be it that they no more come back to us, ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... defeat at Pavia, the king became morbidly pious. By trumpet cry at the crossways of Paris, we learn from the Journal, games—quoits, tennis, contreboulle—were prohibited on Sundays; children were forbidden to sing along the streets, going to and from school; blasphemers[108] were to be severely punished. In 1527 a notary ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... say that he is always moral and modest. Alas! in this our day decency of manners is preserved at the expense of morality of heart, and delicacies for vice are allowed, whilst grossness against it is hypocritically, or at least morbidly, condemned. ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... prosperous city by a fire which alone saved it from the looting of Octavius's soldiers, made a profound impression upon all Umbria. Her own home seemed to be physically darkened by evil memories. Her mind strayed morbidly in the shadows, forever picturing her brother's last hours in some fresh guise of horror. She recovered her self-control only through the shock of discovering that her trouble was eating into her ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... the possibility of a catastrophe, in spite of all he could do, was ever present to him; and she saw also, or thought she saw, that his conception of his own part in the great religious campaign was strangely—morbidly—dependent upon the fate of Hester. If he was able to save her from herself and from the man who threatened her, well and good; if not, as he had said to Mary once before, he was not fit to be any man's leader, and should feel himself the Jonah of any cause. There was a certain mystical passion ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... mention that in one specimen, in which the calcified plates were most developed, and which was nearly ready to moult, there were, within the filamentary appendages on the prosoma, small irregular balls of calcareous matter, appearing to me as if calcareous matter had been morbidly excreted, and not like a ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... interview, even though she was quite sure that he would not lose his self-control and wax violent, as had Nick on that terrible night at Simla. She was almost morbidly ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... their cabin, and listened. A faint rhythmical roll, rising and falling in long undulations against the invisible horizon, to his accustomed ears told him the wind was blowing among the pines in the valley. Yet, mingling with this familiar sound, his ear, now morbidly acute, seemed to detect a stranger inarticulate murmur, as of confused and excited voices, swelling up from the mysterious depths to the stars above, and again swallowed up in the gulfs of silence below. ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the diseases of the individual conscience. Only life interests him now, and only life feverishly alive; and the judicial irony has gone out of his scheme of things. The fantastic, experimental artist returns, now no longer external, but become morbidly curious. The man of science, groping after something outside science, reaches back, though with a certain uneasiness, to the nursery legend of the Rat-wife in Little Eyolf; and the Rat-wife is neither reality nor imagination, neither Mother ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... result of precocious knavery; not so to the people of that generation. They were looked upon as fearful demonstrations of diabolical power, and preludes to the coming of Satan, with his infernal confederates, to overwhelm the land. The imaginations of all were excited, and their apprehensions morbidly aroused. The very air was filled with rumors, fancies, and fears. The ministers sounded the alarm from their pulpits. The magistrates sharpened the sword of justice. The deputy-governor of the colony, Danforth, began to arrest suspected ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... Then as his morbidly keen observation caught a certain look of blankness on Travis' face, and his rapid glance noted no vacant chair at table, he gave a quick ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... not to be thought of. Leave it to me to devise a way. Besides, you need not allow him so many opportunities that the strain would become unbearable. You are busy, owing to the certain increase of work brought about by this murder. Your time will be greatly occupied. But, don't render him morbidly suspicious. For instance, no more dinners at The Hollies. No more gadding about by night, if you hear weird noises on the other side of the river. And you must absolutely deny yourself the pleasurable excitement ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... things they never dream of asking anybody else to do. I'd like to see 'em even ask 'Gene Bantry to go and do some of the things they get me to do! A person isn't good-natured just because he's fat," he concluded, morbidly, "but ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... unusual attraction detected in a first glance is a sufficient apology for a second,—not a prolonged and impertinent stare, but an appreciating homage of the eyes, such as a stranger may inoffensively yield to a passing image. It is astonishing how morbidly sensitive some vulgar beauties are to the slightest demonstration of this kind. When a lady walks the streets, she leaves her virtuous-indignation countenance at home; she knows well enough that the street is a picture-gallery, where pretty faces framed in pretty bonnets are ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... "Puseyism" was unknown in the days when this drawing was made; but the kindly and helpful influences of what may be called ecclesiastical sentiment, which, in a morbidly exaggerated condition, forms one of the principal elements of "Puseyism,"—I use this word regretfully, no other existing which will serve for it,—had been known and felt in our wild ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... attentions. Carroll read each one carefully and filed it away. He had hoped for this, but the results had far exceeded his expectations, and he found himself bewildered rather than assisted by the response from nameless individuals who were morbidly eager to be ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... it exhibits an intense earnestness in analyzing the state of her own mind, and perhaps rather too much proneness to dwell morbidly upon it, also evinces the tender joy and peace with which she was often blessed by the manifested presence of her Lord. It unfolds an advancement in Christian experience to which her conduct bore living testimony, and proves that in humble reliance on the hope set before her in the gospel, with ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... maltreating some victim, who is an inferior as regards wit, fortune, or physique. It is worth remarking that the only really original and characteristic class of jokes which the slave States originated are strongly marked with that cruelty and vulgarity which naturally attend the morbidly vain and semi-civilized man, who is so unfortunate as to have inferiors by fortune entirely in his power. I would ask the reader in confirmation of this to simply turn over the large collection of 'Georgia Major' and 'Simon Suggs' tales, which, emanating from the South, have ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... avoided the noise of town life by retiring to a grotto at Salamis which he had arranged for himself with a view of the sea; for which reason, his biographer tells us, most of his similes are drawn from the sea. He, rather than Petrarch or Rousseau, was the father of sentimentality. His morbidly sensitive Hippolytos cries 'Alas! would it were possible that I should see myself standing face to face, in which case I should have wept for the sorrows that we suffer'; and in the chorus of The Suppliants we have: 'This insatiate ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... Marian began, affably, "and you will have to be content with seeing me. You have a morbidly acute conscience, Mr. Merwyn, to return a book ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... expression. The luster of inquiring glance faded swiftly into vacant glassiness. 'Can you steer?' I asked the agent eagerly. He looked very dubious; but I made a grab at his arm, and he understood at once I meant him to steer whether or no. To tell you the truth, I was morbidly anxious to change my shoes and socks. 'He is dead,' murmured the fellow, immensely impressed. 'No doubt about it,' said I, tugging like mad at the shoe-laces. 'And, by the way, I suppose Mr. Kurtz is dead as well by ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... Germany by its publishers, Messrs. Breitkopf und Haertel. In England and America it still seems to be widely read, and is, more than any other single work, responsible for the false notions that are abroad about Wagner. Sensuality, that is in the morbidly sexual sense of the term, was no part of Wagner's character, nor could it be of the man who justly claimed that no poet had ever glorified women as he had done. His Sentas, Elsas, Bruennhildes, and I must add his Isoldes, rightly understood, afford the best ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... childlike air; but Louis, though young in years, had the character and appearance of an old man. As much as Hortense loved liberty, her suspicious husband wished to hold firmly the reins of conjugal authority. He was prematurely afflicted with various infirmities, almost always morbidly nervous and impressionable, disposed to take a dark view of everything, and bore no resemblance to the type of hero which Hortense had imagined. Moreover, the unhappy husband endured a hidden anguish which he had to conceal from every ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... equally evident that he is not happy and content. He seems suffering and out of health in soul and body. Perhaps God has sent him to us and to his childhood's home for healing. Let us, therefore, be very careful, very tender and considerate. He is naturally proud and sensitive, and is morbidly so now." ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... sore throat, because it is understood to be caused by inhaling the fumes from the carbolic acid used in the wards. Her rich colour had to Rose's dismay grown poor and pale for a time. She had laboured under the still more trying and more dangerous infliction, when the senses morbidly excited become morbidly acute, and she seemed still to smell the peculiar air of the wards wherever she went. Then Mrs. Hull insisted on Annie's leaving for a few days, and bundled her off, without the ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... and a keen desire to be liked. It might be seen, in the present sharp nervous play of emotion over his face, how utterly he was unsuited to the weight of mental discomfort,—how it fretted and galled him. That he was a gentleman, and by nature of a morbidly just and fair disposition, only made his present distress the ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... famous quarrel was first told by Pope, and his version was long accepted in many quarters as final; but later opinion inclines to hold Addison guiltless of the grave accusations brought against him. Pope was morbidly sensitive to slights, morbidly eager for praise, and extremely irritable. To a man of such temper, trifles light as air became significant of malice and hatred. Such trifles unhappily confirmed Pope's suspicions; ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... seat by the bed. Irony! She whose only desire was to be let go free, was mainly responsible for his breakdown! But for her, there would be nothing on his mind, for he would not be married! Brooding morbidly, she asked herself—his drinking, debts, even the girl—had she caused them, too? And when she tried to free him and herself—this was the result! Was there something fatal about her that must destroy the men she had to do with? ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... frequently done by over than by under culture in the moral training of youth. Judicious letting alone is a precious element in real education, and there are certain chords which, often touched and made to vibrate too early, are apt to lose instead of gaining power; to grow first weakly and morbidly sensitive, and then hard and dull; and finally, when the full harmony of the character depends upon their truth and depth of tone, to have lost some measure of both under ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... advance, so that it was really the feast day we made of it. That limb restored him to a dignity he seemed to have abdicated. It hid his obvious misfortune—you could not at first glance tell that he was a cripple, a something of which he had been morbidly conscious and savagely resentful. He would never again be able to run, or even to walk rapidly for any length of time, although he covered the ground at a good and steady gait; and as he grew more and more accustomed to the limb there was only a slight limp to distinguish him. ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... we not aware of far keener distress which he afterwards endured from yet greater injustice, we might suppose that the sufferings he had to bear from placing himself in opposition to the custom of the school, by refusing to fag, had made him morbidly sensitive on the point of liberty. At a time, however, when freedom of speech, as indicating freedom of thought, was especially obnoxious to established authorities; when no allowance could be made on the score of youth, still less on that of individual peculiarity, Shelley became ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... day mostly in solitude, and retraced in tender thought the stages of their long friendship. His friend had been a woman of strong and marked individuality, who had loved life, and had made many loyal friends. She was intensely, almost morbidly, aware of the suffering of the world, especially of animals; and Hugh remembered how she had once told him that a shooting-party in the neighbouring squire's woods had generally meant for her a sleepless night, at the thought of wounded birds and beasts ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... made the homeward travel much more lengthy and tedious. The Indians of the party were troublesome, and the principal guide, English Chief, was sulky and disobedient. This man had insisted on being accompanied by two of his wives, of whom he was so morbidly jealous that he could scarcely bring himself to leave them for an hour in order to go hunting or to prospect the country; consequently he did little or nothing in the killing of game, and this kept the expedition on very small rations. Mackenzie got wroth with him, and so gave him ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... seen, however, that Lottie was not morbidly conscientious. She had gathered honey everywhere, and often in spite of conscience's protest. But now, for a rarity, conscience appeared with, and not against her. She was satisfied with the fact that she felt better than ever before; and the majority of even somewhat ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... for parents of morbidly sensitive and over-scrupulous children, with acute likes and dislikes, to discourage the tendency of the child to become more and more peculiar. Sensitive children are inclined to worry because they think others do not care for them or ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... dryness of the muzzle; dry skin; staring coat; loins morbidly sensitive to pressure; fullness of the left flank, which is caused by the distention of the fourth stomach by gas. The pulse is small, the gait is feeble and staggering; each step taken is accompanied with a grunt, and this symptom is especially marked if the animal walks in a downward ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... this was done, he was reduced to a state of idleness, and his mind began to dwell morbidly on the idea of being left to spend the rest of his days on the island. His converse with Cuffy became so sad that the spirits of that sagacious and sympathetic dog were visibly affected. He did, indeed, continue to lick his master's hand lovingly, and to creep close to his side on all ...
— Jarwin and Cuffy • R.M. Ballantyne
... will tell you now why I know we cannot be happy. In the first place, when you say that I am proud of birth, that I am morbidly ambitious, that I am anxious to shine in the great world, and that after the first intoxication of love has passed away I shall feel bitterness against one who has so humbled my pride and darkened my prospects, I am not sure that you wholly err. But I am sure that the instant remedy is ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... friend was perfectly well, Dr. Smith soon discontinued his visits, and, not being called upon, never saw him again. But just at this time the poet's condition got rapidly worse, and the first tokens of insanity began to show themselves. Morbidly occupied with one set of thoughts, he had now lost the consciousness of his own identity, and addressed his wife and children as strangers. When the former first heard her husband speaking of 'John Clare' as a third person, she became terribly frightened; but thinking ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... the usual anecdotes—one is tempted to call them the stock stories of the boyhood of any great composer. In infancy Chopin could not hear music without crying. Mozart was morbidly sensitive to the tones of a trumpet. Later the Polish lad sported familiarly with his talents, for he is related to have sent to sleep and awakened a party of unruly boys at his father's school. Another story is his fooling of a Jew merchant. He had high spirits, perhaps too high, ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... on the death of Leonidas. An act of dexterous perfidy, and an act of patriotic self-devotion, call forth the same kind and the same degree of respectful admiration. The moral sensibility of the writer seems at once to be morbidly obtuse and morbidly acute. Two characters altogether dissimilar are united in him. They are not merely joined, but interwoven. They are the warp and the woof of his mind; and their combination, like that of the variegated threads in shot silk, gives to the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... him, I could more and more clearly distinguish an under-current of thought and feeling setting towards the faith which Christianity preaches. He said little or nothing, even when I attempted to draw him out on the matter; for he was almost morbidly careful not to seem to know any thing he did not know, or to appear what he was not. The most I could get out of him was—but I had better give a little talk I had with him on one occasion. It was some time before we began to go to Marion's on a Sunday evening, and I had asked him to go with me ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... his condition finally affected his mind and he became quite melancholy at times and mentally unbalanced. It was nothing permanent, the doctors said, and the mental trouble would pass away if he regained his health, but Clement was morbidly sensitive about it and was terribly afraid people would find it out and consider him crazy all the rest of his life, and that his career would ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... faithfully and zealously performed, yet the deep sadness of her countenance, and the evident anxiety of her mind at first awakened a suspicion of mental derangement. She seemed restless, suspicious, and morbidly apprehensive of approaching danger. The appearance of a stranger, or a sudden ringing of the bell, would cause her to start, tremble, and exhibit the greatest perturbation of spirit. In fact, she seemed so constantly on the qui vive, the lady of the house one day said to her, ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... him to spend a Sunday at Hampstead, and Philip passed a happy day with a set of exuberant strangers; he ate and drank a great deal, took a walk on the heath, and came away with a general invitation to come again whenever he liked; but he was morbidly afraid of being in the way, so waited for a formal invitation. Naturally enough it never came, for with numbers of friends of their own the Nixons did not think of the lonely, silent boy whose claim upon their hospitality was so small. So on Sundays he got up late and took a walk along the ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... thrown on my hands to entertain. So of course I had to renounce all thoughts of visiting the sloop. I should not have dared to go there anyway, with Mr. Shaw and the captain able more or less to overlook my motions from the beach, for I was quite morbidly afraid of attracting attention to the derelict. It seemed to me a happy miracle that no one but myself had taken any interest in her, or been inspired to ask by what chance so small a boat had come to be wrecked upon these desolate shores. Fortunately ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... sorrowful meditations, and so constantly were they concerned with the two ladies whose feelings he wished to spare, that when a hum of voices reached his ear, one of them strangely—even ominously—familiar, he only thought at first that his imagination had grown morbidly vivid. To dispel the unpleasant fancies suggested by this imagined voice, he raised his head, and then the next instant bounded from ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... the suppression of such traffic one of the most important duties of the legislature. Such opinions were uncommon, even amongst the Presbyterians, and his rigid respect for truth served to strengthen the impression that he was morbidly scrupulous. If he unintentionally made a misstatement—even about some trifling matter—as soon as he discovered his mistake he would lose no time and spare no trouble in hastening to correct it. "Why, in the name of reason," he was asked, "do you ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... zealous biographer of Tasso never fairly recovered; the awful name of Galileo sanctioned the asperity of critical decision, and more particularly the severe remarks on the language, a subject on which the Italians are so morbidly delicate, and so trivially grave. Serassi's conduct on this occasion was at once political, timorous, and cunning. Gladly would he have annihilated the original, but this was impossible! It was some consolation that the manuscript was totally ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... more unselfish than Mr. Mackenzie. He would rather suffer extreme hardship than accept a doubtful favour. Even in regard to kindly and reasonable offers of help, he was morbidly sensitive (as mentioned on page 298 of his "Life and Times"); and yet, looking at the conduct of many men in like circumstances, he deserved commendation rather than ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... Fame, nevertheless, reached him; but when found, it was with him a possession much resembling the child's toy. His heart to the last appeared too deeply imbued with the unsuspicious simplicity and carelessness of the boy to have much concern about it. On this point Tannahill was morbidly sensitive; his was an unfortunate cast of temperament, which, deepening more and more, surrounded him with imaginary evils, and rendered life insupportable. Lady Nairn was too modest not to be distrustful of the extent of her genius, and presumed only to exercise it ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... same man in this conversation that we find him in the interview before our Lord's journey to raise Lazarus, and in the interview after our Lord's resurrection. In all three cases he appears as mainly under the dominion of sense, as slow to apprehend anything beyond its limits, as morbidly melancholy and disposed to take the blackest possible view of things—a practical pessimist—and yet with a certain kind of frank outspokenness which half redeems the other characteristics from blame. He could not understand all the Lord's ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... took up her knitting. A sock for Leander it was—one of many of all sizes. She remembered the first that she had measured for the bare pink toes which he had brought there, forlorn candidates for the comfortable integuments in which they were presently encased, and how she had morbidly felt that every stitch she took was a renunciation of her own children, since a stranger was honored in their place. The tears came into her eyes. It was only this afternoon that she had experienced a pang of self-reproach ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... morbid element of this kind. (b) Those which depend on mere verbal resemblances or other fortuitous correspondences. Nordau shows that the diseased brain is very ready to follow these false trains of association. (c) Those which are connected with the sense of smell, which seems to be morbidly developed in this kind of degeneracy. (d) Those which in any way minister to ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... rendering him automatic in his actions, merely animal in his half-satisfied appetites. Fines and curses were his portion at the factory; curses and beatings—deserved if Justice held a hurried scale at home. Paul, who had read of suicide in The Bludston Herald, turned his thoughts morbidly to death. But his dramatic imagination always carried him beyond' his own demise to the scene in the household when his waxlike corpse should be discovered dangling from a rope fixed to the hook in the kitchen ceiling. He posed cadaverous ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... practice—now unfortunately no longer confined to inferior writers—of forcing attention to a novel by making it the gibbet of well-known personalities, with little or no disguise; and Chopin himself, morbidly sensitive and fanciful though he was, read her work without perceiving in it any intention there to portray their relations to each other, which, indeed, had differed essentially from those of the personages ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... not hear him, being morbidly pleased with his own eloquence. There was a beautiful gloom about his utterances, so he thought; they seemed to ennoble him, to heighten ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... gone down into the darkness, praying all the way; and now that he had come out of it, and had so little society; now that his young life was all behind him, and so few earthly hopes beckoned him on, he turned with a heart morbidly religious to what seemed to him the only source of comfort open to him. Jim had watched him with pain. He had seen him, from day to day, spending his hours alone, and felt that prayer formed almost the staple of his life. He had seen him willing to work, but knew that his heart ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... and brooded. He was very hungry and very tired, and it seemed to him that he had been disillusioned in a new dimension. Morbidly, he remembered a frequently given lecture from ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... secure for him the consolations of the Church. I obeyed him. I caused masses to be said for him. I procured for him the visits of his priest. I left nothing undone to give him peace and joy. Would it not have been monstrous had I acted otherwise? He was morbidly anxious for the future: he, righteous man, who was as pure in spirit, as guileless, as an infant! I alone followed him to the grave; and after I had seen his sacred dust consigned to earth, I crawled home with a heart almost broken with its grief. I hid myself in my room for the day; and before ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... the only obstacle to a cure which I have witnessed, has been tuberculosis of the chest or abdominal viscera, or of both at the same time, and still more the vaccine-virus; likewise a tendency to paralysis in persons who were otherwise morbidly affected. Tuberculosis has often been combated by a single dose of a high potence of Sulphur between the doses of Apis, no Apis being given after the Sulphur, as long as the course of the typhoid symptoms would render it safe to postpone ...
— Apis Mellifica - or, The Poison of the Honey-Bee, Considered as a Therapeutic Agent • C. W. Wolf
... who had been clerk to the District Attorney, and was cognizant of all the facts. He was a prominent Broderick man, hated Casey for having left that wing of the party and joined the other wing, and adopted this means to blast him in reputation. Casey was morbidly sensitive on the subject. He had been apprised that King intended to publish the matter; and early in the afternoon of the day of the shooting he called upon Mr. King in his office, and warned him to desist from the publication. ...
— The Vigilance Committee of '56 • James O'Meara
... own carriage, "really it makes one believe in that odd doctrine of, what is it, Compensations; but, certainly, people of great talent always are a little mad. If they're not flightily mad with eccentricity and brandy, they are morbidly mad with solitude and sentiment. Now she is a great creature, really a great creature; might have the world at her feet if she liked; and all she cares for is a big dog, a bunch of roses, and some artist or poet dead and gone three hundred or three thousand years! ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... pranks in old witch times, matters might have gone hard with him; at least if the constable and posse comitatus could have executed a warrant, or the jailer had been cunning enough to keep him. But it has often occurred to me as a very singular circumstance, and as betokening either a temperament morbidly suspicious or some weighty cause of apprehension, that he never trusts himself within the grasp even of his most intimate friend. If you step forward to meet him, he readily advances; if you offer him your hand, he extends his own with an air of the utmost frankness; but, though ...
— Monsieur du Miroir (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was a miserable man, who went through the world with a morbidly sensitive spot in his nature. A touch on it was torture, and unfortunately the circumstances of his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... upon marriage as a state of perfect felicity. Her own had been unhappy. She knew the dark phantom that haunted our wedded hours; and what if the same hereditary curse should cling to Edith,—who might become morbidly sensitive on ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... of Bellister sat on, "glooming" morbidly to himself. Bitter feud existed between him and a neighbouring baron. Had he not cause to distrust that baron, and to believe that means neither fair nor honourable might be employed by his enemy to wipe out the feud? What ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... great an artist to show his hand "in getting his audience," as Poe and Tschaikowsky occasionally do. His intellectual muscles are too strong to let him become over-influenced, as Ravel and Stravinsky seem to be by the morbidly fascinating—a kind of false beauty obtained by artistic monotony. However, we cannot but feel that he would weave his spell over us—as would the Grimms and Aesop. We feel as much under magic as the "Enchanted Frog." This is part of the artist's business. The effect is ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives |
